Review: Bruno Reidal Is an Unsparing Depiction of a Society in Moral Transition

The ostensible subject of Vincent Le Port’s Bruno Reidal is the eponymous character (Dimitri Doré), based on a real-life teenager who, in 1905, beheaded a 12-year-old neighbor in a small village in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in the southeast of France. But this figure, in whom today we readily recognize the pathology of a psychotic killer, lived at a socio-historic crossroads that might be interpreted as Le Port’s true area of interest: the transition from the church to scientific methods of analysis and diagnosis—and their alliance with the state—as the primary forces of social control in France.

Bruno Reidal opens in media res, with a bracing shot of Bruno being sprayed with blood as he saws the head off of his unseen victim’s body. (We’ll have to wait most of the film for the not necessarily welcome reverse angle.) The provincial Bruno is a 17-year-old seminarian, in training to join the clergy, at the time of the murder, and he immediately confesses to the seemingly arbitrary slaying. After being arrested, he’s turned over to a panel of psychologists, led by Professor Lacassagne (Jean-Luc Vincent), to assess whether the young man is fit to stand trial or belongs in an asylum—a relatively new legal principle at the time.

Most of the film takes place in flashback as Bruno tells his stern inquisitors his life story with a frankness that can often feel a bit too literary and self-aware, but then, this is an educated 19th-century seminary student, so perhaps his very precise elocutions on the erotics of violence isn’t too far off base. Lacassagne, whom we return to periodically throughout the film, betrays very few reactions to the sordid details. But one imagines that, behind his slightly upturned eyebrows, this turn-of-the-century psychoanalyst is turning giddy at the prospect of the study he’ll be able to publish on Bruno’s matter-of-factly recounted episodes of masturbating to fantasies of stabbing his handsome fellow student, Blondel (Tino Vigier).

As presented here, it’s almost as if this murderer were produced by the emerging psychological theories of his day. Bruno even grounds his own displacement of sexual desire onto acts of violence in a perverse kind of primal scene. Rather than, as in Freudian psychoanalysis, surreptitiously witnessing his parents making love, he remembers his villages’ communal pig slaughters as possessing a mysterious and inspiring charge for him as a boy. The realization that men could be killed like pigs occupies his thoughts throughout his childhood, and we follow Bruno as his perversion goes unnoticed among the toiling peasants of his community, and at least in part shielded by the Catholic Church into which he’s recruited.

Doré plays the taciturn, mentally tortured Bruno with his head perpetually lowered and cocked to one side, telegraphing the way the boy embodies the distorted morality of a society caught between differing norms of discipline, punishment, and sex. In this regard, and in his perverse-poetic confessions, Bruno is almost too perfect a subject, both for Lacassagne and for Le Port. At times, Bruno and Lacassange’s demeanors approach caricature, as if the actors were playing social types rather than actual individuals. This might suit a film more interested in cultivating irony, but Bruno Reidal aims much more to be a classically grim morality play.

There’s also a neat inevitability to the action, from Bruno’s nearly involuntary masturbation whenever he imagines or witnesses brutality, all the way to the eventual explicit depiction of the murder itself, that takes away some of the shock that should probably accompany seeing a child murdered and beheaded. But perhaps Le Port sees shock as beside the point, as the film is ultimately a study of the witches’ brew of class repression, religious piety, and state discipline that underlay the horrible act that forms the core of the story. Subtitled Confessions of a Murderer, the film concerns two different forms of confession: the Catholic rite that results in the expiation of one’s sins, and the self-identification to the modern authorities that, rather than washing away your crimes, attaches them permanently to your person. As the unsparing Bruno Reidal shows, neither type can account for the evil humans are capable of.